4
FRANCES PAID LITTLE attention to Miss Hunter’s fears. Hadn’t there always been bullies and copper stealers on the streets near her home? And hadn’t Mike taught her at an early age how to defend herself? She smiled as she left the Society’s offices, walking past tidy rows of narrow brownstone houses with steep front steps. Some of them were decorated with pots of red salvia and pink geraniums, the blooms of summer.
She passed dry goods shops, which sold buttons and thread and bolts of cloth, greengrocers’ with bins of shiny apples and hard, green pears, and small cubbyholes for dressmakers, confectioners, and barbers.
As she neared West Sixteenth Street, the shops became fewer as tenements crowded together. Here and there Frances saw open doorways and knew that the people who lived in the small, cramped rooms were trying to catch a bit of fresh air. Occasionally she saw someone sunning in a doorway. She smiled at an elderly man in a threadbare gray suit who chewed on an unlit pipe, and at a woman whose shawl had fallen back from her dark hair.
The man nodded, but the woman threw Frances a look of dark suspicion.
Frances was suddenly self-conscious about her own brown gabardine skirt; high-collared, white cotton blouse; high-buttoned shoes; and dark straw hat. Once she had dressed as this woman did, in homespun skirt and shawl, and—unless the weather was cold—her feet had been bare. Memories of her childhood came forth in a jarring jumble of sadness and joy. Frances took deep breaths and walked a little faster.
As her steps led her down West Sixteenth Street toward Ninth Avenue, Frances began to understand what Miss Hunter had been worried about. Small knots of children hung around doorsteps or jostled and pushed one another. They darted at some of the adults going past, snatched fist-size chunks of bread from the basket of a helpless old woman, and taunted a bent, arthritic man who walked with a cane. The man struck out in fear, connecting with the nose of one of his tormentors, who ran down the street bawling and bleeding.
Frances hurried to the aid of the elderly man, but he suddenly ducked into one of the tenements. She blinked in surprise as she stared at the poorly constructed building. The wood showed signs of being fairly new, but it was badly stained. Here and there were cracks in the siding that would surely let the cold winter winds blow through, and the windows were small and grimy. This was the address at which she had lived, but the familiar tenement had disappeared, replaced by an even uglier, more ramshackle building. Frances clutched her reticule with trembling fingers. Where was her home? The people she had known?
A woman stretched out of a lower window and yelled to a group of children, “Go away! Get out of here! Bad boys, the lot of you!”
“Ma’am?” Frances called to her. “Pardon me, ma’am. Do you know what happened to the building that used to be here?”
“Bad fire. Burned to the ground.” The woman sneered, and her words snapped with bitterness. “It didn’t take the owner long to rebuild. Lost money, he did, until he built something else to cram people into.”
Frances felt tears burn her eyes. The building had been cramped and dirty and unsafe, but the room in which the Kellys had lived was a warm and loving part of her life.
But now that room was gone. Her last tie to New York City was no longer here. “Oh, Da. Oh, Danny,” she whispered. “How it hurt to lose you! Oh, how I miss you!”
Suddenly the woman in the window yelled loudly, “Tommy! Jimbo! Leave the lady alone or she’ll be callin’ the police on you!”
Frances felt a tug on her arm. She whirled, swinging her reticule to one side, out of the grasp of a short, dark-haired boy.
He fell against Frances, off balance, and she grabbed his wrist, holding it tightly.
“Let me go, miss!” he yelled. “I did nothin’ wrong. I was just passin’ by.”
“What are you doin’ in our part of town, anyway?” one of the other boys demanded of Frances. “Let Tommy go!”
Frances looked down into Tommy’s dirt-smudged face. “Who is taking care of you, Tommy?” she asked.
“No one. I take care of myself, I do,” he answered.
“You can get help,” Frances said. As he struggled to escape, she held his arm and insisted, “Listen to me, Tommy! You don’t have to live like this. The Children’s Aid Society will send you west to a new home with foster parents to care for you. You’ll have good food and go to school and—”
“Go to school?” Someone in the crowd laughed and shouted an obscenity.
Frances looked around, startled at the adults and children who had gathered.
“You and your kind stay out of here!” a man shouted.